Sunday, July 25, 2010

I didn’t write a single line of code for the never-ending doxygen comment conversion, but I did end up working quite a bit on the epub validating library. It’s progressing quite nicely, it’s already a couple of KLOC. I’m also doing it TDD-style which I’m finding to be a rather pleasant workflow, once you get used to it. Seeing a test fail and catch a regression I wouldn’t notice until after it was too late brings a smile to my face. On a related note, gtest and gmock are awesome.

Oh, remember when I said that writing XML validation checkers by hand instead of using schemas would be painful? Guess what, it is. It really, really is. :)

One of the other benefits of working on this library is that I’m solving all sorts of problems with Xerces integration. The library uses Xerces for everything XML, and working with it has given lots of insights that will be applicable to Sigil when I start replacing QDom with it.

I’ll be mostly working on this library over the coming weeks, so Sigil will see only bug fixes going forward. Hey, the library is the major future feature for Sigil since it will be integrated into it, so transitively I’ll still be working on Sigil all this time.

Qt 4.7 is just around the corner too[1]. When it does arrive, you can expect a version of Sigil integrating it very quickly, provided there are no problems migrating to the newer Qt[2]. The QtWebKit improvements alone make me giddy like a little schoolgirl. 4x faster rendering? Hell yeah!

Footnotes

[1] Actually I expected it to be released while I was on vacation. Or at least QtWebKit 2.0. Nokia devs said that was coming in May, and it’s the very end of July now… grumble…

[2] I seriously expect no problems. Nokia has always been adamant about backwards compatibility, and from past experience I can say they usually do a good job on this.